binfalse

Kile, KDE’s Integrated LaTeX Environment, has a weird bug: Every time I update something in the UI it recreates its config file and I loose some menu options, such as Settings -> Configure Kile where you used to configure your preferences..

In Figure 1 you can see the menu as expected. There are some entries to Configure Kile, t0 Configure Toolbars, to Configure Shortcuts and to switch to Full Screen Mode, etc. However, as soon as I update certain things in the user interface (UI), eg. if I add a new action icon to the toolbar to quickly get the \textbf{} environment for bold fonts, these entries get lost. In those cases Kile won’t be configureable anymore. The resulting toolbar is shown in Figure 2. You see, the number of entries significantly decreased..

Figure 2: Kile -- the unexpected menu

However, I just discovered the reason: Kile in these cases rewrites its config in an unexpected manner…
If you have a look at the configuration stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kile/kileui.rc you’ll find an XML subtree such as:

No idea where it comes from, but the 1 in noMerge prevents the default menu entries to be merged into the minimal set of entries defined in that snippet. However, now that we know what’s wrong we can easily fix it! Just replace the 1 with a 0 and restart Kile. You might want to do the same for all other menus to discover that you’ve also been missing some entries in the Help menu ;-)

TinyTinyRSS (TT-RSS) is something that the Google reader always wanted and Feedly still wants to be. Just better! :)

TT-RSS is a free and open source feed aggregator, which can be deployed to your own machine. For example, my instance is running on a cubieboard in my living room.
Thus, I’m independent of any company and their plans with my data :)

However, I don’t want to advertise TT-RSS too much, but I want to tell you how to fetch your feeds through a proxy, such as polipo or squid.

Configuring TT-RSS to use a Proxy

It’s apparently undocumented, but looking into the code it turns out that feeds are fetched using cURL:

And as you can see, the code already supports the usage of a proxy: if (defined('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY')).

I think that might be very interesting to many of you guys and I’ve no idea why it is not documented. However, you can simply define the variable _CURL_HTTP_PROXY in your config.php file. For example, to use a proxy at host 127.0.0.1 listening at port 8123 add the following:

define('_CURL_HTTP_PROXY','127.0.0.1:8123');

Now, the TT-RSS traffic will go through the proxy at :8123, which might tunnel everything through, e.g., TOR. Thus, the location of your living room will not be disclosed :)

BONUS: Cache all the Images in Feeds

By default, TT-RSS will not cache the images in feeds. That means, if there is an image in an article, you will be redirected to load the image from a foreign server. That’s obviously something I’d like to avoid, especially because there are plenty of ads or tracking pixels which shouldn’t know about my habits and surf times. But there is an alternative: TT-RSS is able to cache images. It will download the images to your server and deliver the cached versions instead of forwarding
you to somewhere else.

Unfortunately, that is not the default. If you want that functionality you need to configure every single feed (Edit Feed → Options → Cache images locally). And you must not forget to repeat that procedure for every new feed that will be added in 15+ months…

To avoid that you can simply open the database that TT-RSS uses (e.g. using phpMyAdmin), go to the table ttrss_feeds and modify the default value of the column cache_images from 0 to 1. If that is done, the images of every newly added feed will be cached by default.

If you’re too lazy to manually update the feeds that are already there you can simply run the following SQL query:

Differences in Birth Weight Associated with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Air Pollution Reduction: Results from a Natural Experiment

China radically reduced the air pollution in preparation of the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing.
The authors of the publication Differences in Birth Weight Associated with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Air Pollution Reduction: Results from a Natural Experiment [Rich2015a] studied its affect on the weights of newborns. They evaluated how specific months of pregnancy with less air pollution correlate to the birth weights, compared to pregnancies during the same dates in 2007 or 2009. The records were created and maintained by the Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital and for the study they just included singleton live births of infants who were 28 completed weeks of gestation or greater in one of four adjacent Beijing districts at the time of birth, which is a sample size of 140,298.

And indeed, they found a correlation:

Babies with their 8th month of pregnancy during the 2008 Olympics were, on average, 23g larger

Interestingly, there was apparently no correlation for months 1-7 of pregnancy!?

I guess I do not need to tell you anything about the problems with plastics. There is too much of our durable and water-insoluble waste, which is resistant to most natural processes of degradation. To increase our awareness of the amount of plastic we produce in our daily routines we tried to abstain from producing plastic waste during the last Lent. Wasn’t that easy, as you can probably imagine.

As soon as you try to avoid plastic it seems like everything is made of these organic polymers. I’m not talking about the plastic bags that you receive in supermarkets en passant, or the wrappings around frozen pizzas – those are luxuries and almost easy to avoid. But you will have a hard time to get cheese and meat, as they are almost always wrapped in plastic. Milk is then only available from bottles (significantly increasing the weight of your bag); fruits and vegetables are difficult to get – especially organic food: sellers seem to make sure organic food isn’t mixed with non-organic food and therefore apples, for instance, are neatly wrapped in plastic, often just four at a time.
I think avoiding plastic is a superset of avoiding supermarkets, as there is almost nothing plastic-free you can buy at supermarkets. Thus, local marketplaces are the last resort. There you can bring own vessels to get them filled by the sellers.

However, that was just the easy part. For some things we did not find a good solution and we simply had to abstain from them or we needed to cheat (which really made us feel bad!):

Do you know these tiny plastic things that help you open wine bottles? -> Go for other brands with a screw-cap, for example.

However, the bridge from the lab to the industry is of course challenging. We put high requirements on our products, especially in case of groceries. We do not want to see chemicals from the wrappings passing over to our food and, the other way around, flavours of our food shouldn’t leave the wrappings (just think of coffee!). There are other but equally high requirements for products in medicine and cosmetics.

More than 9k study participants were asked about their habits of sleeping, afterwards the authors of the study recorded who of them had a stroke, for about 9 years.
This study showed, that participants who sleep more than 8 hours a day are 46% more likely to get a stroke than those who sleep 6-8 hours:

Those with short sleep had an 18% increased stroke risk (not statistically significant), while long sleep was associated with a 46% increase in stroke risk after adjustment for conventional cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors and comorbidities.

It’s not yet clear whether there is a causal connection or just a correlation, but I found that potentially interesting. Is a longer sleep already a sign for a bad health condition? Even worse, is sleep a reason for a stroke?

Since I am a researcher I need to be aware and up-to-date with funding opportunities. They increase your sovereignty and improve your working conditions. And as there is so much information you need to keep in mind I decided to collect them (which are somehow relevant for me) in a tiny article. Maybe some of you might also benefit from it.

Local

University of Rostock

Graduate Academy

The Graduate Academy provides funding for advanced trainings of young scientists. It focuses on PhD students, but PostDocs are also welcome. Applying is very easy, they do not reject anyone. You just need a collaboration agreement with your supervisor, which is useful anyway. The Academy funds about €500 per year and offers lot’s of training courses.

HERMES

The HERMES program will fund you if you want to stay abroad. It’s purpose is to establish new collaborations and develop a grant proposal with the

ELFI

ELFI (ELektronische ForschungsförderInformationen) provides information on funding opportunities for students, scientists and consultants all over the German-speaking area. It’s a local database with a search interface.

MV

Foundations & Associations

DAAD

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) promotes international relations of German universities through exchange of students and scientists, and through international programs and projects. The also maintain a huge database with job offers and open PhD positions etc.

Volkswagen Foundation

The Volkswagen Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization and has been funding research projects in all disciplines. Within the framework of changing funding initiatives, the foundation provides impetus for the development of research and higher education. Biggest scientific stiftung in Germany.

Foundation Prince of Asturias: Awards: Each award is endowed with 50.000 euro. There are the following categories: Social Sciences, Communication and Humanities, Technical and Scientific Research jährlich

Right Livelihood Award: The Award honours and supports those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today. It has become known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. jährlich

That’s it.

FreeBSD, one of the Unixs par excellence, comes up with an virtual terminal right after installation. By default, the video mode is not very … user-friendly … and leaves space for improvements :)
Given the loaded VESA module (kldload vesa) you can find out which modes are supported by your hardware using

vidcontrol -i mode

To apply a certain video mode you just need to run

vidcontrol MODE_280

as root and enjoy your new video setting.

This will just change the video mode in your current session. If the new setting is what you expected and desired you can apply it permanently in your /etc/rc.conf:

Anyone of you using denyhosts?
It works quite well, but I regularly need to remove some false positives. Manually. And that sucks.

Manually removing an IP

To remove a false positive you need to remove the IP from the following files:

/etc/hosts.deny

$DENYHOSTS/hosts

$DENYHOSTS/hosts-restricted

$DENYHOSTS/hosts-root

$DENYHOSTS/hosts-valid

$DENYHOSTS/users-hosts

with $DENYHOSTS being the working directory of denyhosts, in Debian’s case it is /var/lib/denyhosts/. Open every file, search for $IP, remove the line. As soon as you have a few users that do not get used to using SSH keys this workaround gets annoying quite quick..